Placing a Smooth Drop Shadow Behind an Image

Problem

You want to have soft edges for an image’s drop shadow.

Solution

Adding another nonsemantic div wrapper around
another background image allows for the creation of soft edges on drop
shadows.

First, create a new image in Adobe Photoshop that will act as a
mask to soften the drop shadow image. Using the same dimensions as the
drop shadow, delete the entire image content in the file, leaving only a
transparent background.